The View from Above: Amazon's Spaceballs

The company’s downtown takeover just got spherical.

Amazon’s ever-expanding footprint in Seattle now includes these three towering, 80- to 95-foot-high glass bubbles at Lenora Street and Sixth Avenue. They are, depending how you look at them, beehives or futuristic biodomes—a place where Amazon’s downtown workforce can enjoy a temporary escape from their cubicles for fresh air and, in the words of spokesperson Sam Kennedy, “think and work differently.” The 70,000-square-foot space will maintain a 72-degree temperature and 60 percent humidity by day and encase 400 plant species. When the domes are completed and ready for use in January 2018—four years after the design’s approval—a lower retail area will be open to the public. How much did these spheres from the famously tight-lipped Amazon cost? Only the hive mind knows.